Carol Lynn Pearson - No More Goodbyes -

Talk by Carol Lynn Pearson

Encircle Summit, December 7, 2019, Lehi, Utah
Given to 500 LGBTQ youth

“WHAT DO YOU THINK GOD THINKS OF YOU?”

I’ve spent the last year re-visioning heaven, re-visioning God. And I recommend this to all of you. If you don’t like the word “God,” think “Source” or “Universe.” But let’s just simplify and call it God.

My question for you today is: “What do you think God thinks of you?” Not what does your mother or your bishop or your pastor think. But God Himself and God Herself--as I know, and I hope you know—that our Creator is a magnificent partnering of the feminine and the masculine.

I’ve been writing new poems, and one that I like a lot concludes with this line:

“God spoke to me this morning and said, ‘How I love the thought of you. Here’s another day—just think what you can do.’ ”

I stumble a lot and sometimes feel lost in the dark, but when I’m in my right mind I really think God loves the thought of me, the thought that is me, the thought that is you, and the thought that is each of us.

In my poetic mind I sense God as the Great Thought, the First Thinker—“I think; therefore I am the Great I Am.”

So what do you think God thinks of the thought that is you?—as a person and as an LGBTQ person. Have you outsourced that thinking to someone else that you believe knows God better than you do?

And if that someone else thinks that God thinks you are evil or wrong or just not good enough, do you accept that view even though it leaves you in a place of despair?

My book “No More Goodbyes” tells too many stories of the terrible goodbyes we continue to say to our LGBTQ sisters and brothers—to ill-fated marriages, family alienation and suicide.

One of the stories I tell in this book is of my gay friend Brad. He was a convert to the LDS Church, loved it deeply, did everything right, served a mission, knew he would be healed of what he thought to be a curse. He was not healed.

He told me through his tears that he knew God must hate him, that he was surely destined for the lowest part of heaven and he’d just as well go now. He gathered a large supply of pills, took them one night, knew he would have about fifteen minutes, drove directly to the Provo temple, sat on a bench and watched the night sky. He said to me, “I chose that place because I thought there would be kind angels there who would take me in and care for me.” And shame on us that we were not those kind angels here on earth taking care of him.

Brad was in a coma for two weeks but survived. What Brad thought that God thought of him was not only false, it was death-dealing. As you know, that story continues to play out all too often. We must change our perception of God. And most urgently we must change our perception of God’s perception of us.

Once God revealed, “I am Love.” To me that means, as expressed in the little song you may have sung—“Where love is there God is also.” Meaning to me that wherever we find real love—in any community—in Islam, Catholicism, Mormonism, in no ism at all—there God is. And meaning that wherever in a heterosexual union or a homosexual union we find real love, devotion, honor, patience, kindness, faithfulness, there too is where God is.

My very dear LGBTQ sisters and brothers, you now have under the law equal opportunity to create relationships. Please use that opportunity to think not just in terms of sex but in terms of love. Sexual attraction is not a destination, it is an invitation, an opportunity to create love. And being loved thoughts of a loving God, creating love is our calling, our reason for being.

Falling in love is a beautiful step, but rising in love is the destination.

We will all mess up, sometimes big time. But that’s why we have each other. As I write in the final paragraph of “No More Goodbyes”:

“We take turns, then, don’t we? When you are caught on any plain where love is not, I will gather what I have and bring what I can. And when I have used up all my love and am stranded in the cold, I will watch for you to appear with fresh supplies. That way we can make it, I think, all of us. We can be sufficiently creative and sufficiently kind that we will draw circle upon circle upon circle, bringing each other in, leaving no one out, joining, linking, enlarging, until the pattern of the whole human family, seen through the eye of God, is complete.”

So this is the gift I leave with you. As you are going about your life, the happy times, the harsh times, please pause for a moment and say to yourself—

“God spoke to me this morning and said, ‘How I love the thought of you. Here’s another day—just think what you can do.”

May it be so.